Flittering in the Dells

By ROBERT HUGHES

Could you think of a dottier notion for an exhibition than the one now in the lower rooms of the Frick Collection in New York City: "Victorian Fairy Painting"? All those little homunculi and chaste, pocket-size cuties with gauzy wings, flittering about the mossy dells and twiggy bowers of the sentimental English imagination--aargh, spare us. We are so much smarter now, anyway: instead of fairies we believe in close encounters of the third kind, with aliens sticking shiny probes into overweight housewives whisked from the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. And yet, even granting that the show (which was a big hit at the Royal Academy in London, and has since been seen in Iowa City and Toronto) is very much cut down from its original form, it is still a worthwhile curiosity and has interesting things to say about the peculiarities of Victorian culture--with implications for our own.

Fairies, as Stella Beddoe makes clear in a beguiling catalog essay, are so much a fixture of English literature that it's no surprise they infiltrated English painting as well. In the 14th century Chaucer, via the Wife of Bath, was already pointing out that the elf queen and her company had retreated from human contact "manye hundred yeres ago," but their popular life continued to be irrepressible. Shakespeare is full of them--A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest. They pullulate as sylphs in Pope's Rape of the Lock; they appear in the verses of Drayton, Herrick, Milton, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley and Blake. Indeed, whenever national origins were celebrated under the aegis of the Romantic movement, with its passion for the primitive and antiquarian, there the fairies (a.k.a. trolls, elves, pixies, leprechauns, peris) would be.

They colonized the English stage, floating across it on (hopefully) invisible wires as actor-managers put their casts through ever more ethereal effects of movement and stage lighting; their defiance of gravity was to popular theater what the computer generation of dinosaurs and space oddities is to movies today. Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of a fairy painter, Charles Altamont Doyle, who died mad, but the creator of Sherlock Holmes was so gullible himself that as late as 1917 he defended some fake photos of fairies made by an enterprising pair of teenage English schoolgirls. You'd almost suppose that the national emblem of England was neither the lion nor the unicorn nor even John Bull, but the fairy.

But the dingly dells of Titania and Queen Mab bordered on the badlands of sex, drugs and hallucination. The last two, especially, were never far away, and all three pervade Christina Rossetti's extraordinary narrative poem of the symbolic rape of a girl by the "Little People," Goblin Market. In painting the action was milder, but fairies were shown appearing in dreams to maidens whose sleep, as the phials by the bedside make clear, was induced by opiates. Then there were the magic mushrooms, which famously appear in Sir John Tenniel's illustration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--the stoned-out caterpillar sitting on one, puffing at his hookah--and more obscurely in Thomas Heatherley's Fairy Seated on a Mushroom, circa 1860.

Heatherley's odd pastiche, which is in the Frick show, derives equally from Ingres (the nude back) and Hieronymus Bosch (the queer goblin figures). Fairy painters had constant recourse to Bosch and his various 16th century imitators and copyists, including Pieter Bruegel, whose fantasies they could get from prints. A very minor artist, John Anster Fitzgerald (1823-1906), copied some of his elfin sprites directly from Bosch--witness the pair of legs protruding from an egg in Fairies in a Bird's Nest, circa 1860. The oddest thing about the painting, though, is not its somewhat routine little monsters but its frame, a bizarre curiosity of gilded twigs.

Some of England's best 19th century artists painted fairies, though not regularly; J.M.W. Turner did a Queen Mab's Cave, and Sir Edwin Landseer produced a scene of Titania enthralled by the donkey-headed Bottom. But these were spin-offs. By far the best of the fairy painters, and by an equally long way the weirdest, was Richard Dadd (1817-86). A gene of madness ran in his family. Two of Dadd's brothers and one sister were to die insane. Dadd himself, after a mildly promising early career as a landscape and narrative painter, began in his late 20s to suffer acute and agonizing delusions of persecution by devils and to believe he was under the power of the Egyptian god Osiris. In 1843, in the throes of his mania, he stabbed his father, an apothecary, to death and fled to France; he was caught, brought back, certified insane and condemned to life in Bedlam, the English state lunatic asylum.

Like an earlier, literary figure, the English poet Christopher Smart, Dadd produced his best work in the madhouse. His masterpiece was a small but incredibly detailed canvas called The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke. Left not quite finished in 1864, it took him nine years to do. He wrote a detailed explanation of the swarming figures in it, which bear no relation to any other painting or existing literary work. This is not an illustration; it was spun gradually out of the artist's head, in accordance with a process of free association that the Surrealists would have recognized and that Leonardo da Vinci had prefigured when he advised the artist to imagine forms from random blots of rain, mildew or spittle.

We are looking into a tiny clear space in the grass. Stems of grass weave across the view. Dozens of figures--some are tiny, recognizable English types, others exotic--are watching the Fairy Feller, or woodsman, with his ax raised to split a hazelnut. There is nothing cute about these figures. They are all human in form yet obsessively "other." They're not demonic exactly, but they have a scary presence. One might not be wrong to infer Dadd's own terror of sex, for instance, from the implacably swollen breasts and hamlike legs of the servingwomen--if that's what they are--on the left. The paint is meticulous, low toned, and seems stitched like tapestry. Every detail, from the petals of the daisies to the last button on the costumes, gets the same weight of scrutiny. The light is dim and dense, like the strange no-color light that accompanies a solar eclipse. Of all the artists in this show, Dadd is the only one who convinces you that he saw what he painted and painted what he saw--suffering and alone, there in his cell in Bedlam.